"If you consider NetApplications' data set, then Linux owns only about 1 percent of the desktop OS market and Windows has almost 92 percent. But if you consider all computing platforms, including mobile, than Windows has only 20 percent and Linux has 42 percent - and that would be in the form of Google's Android alone." No more or less legitimate than claiming Windows owns 92% of the market. It's all a matter of perspective.

Yes they do, it's baked into the price they pay when buying Windows/OSX and other commercial operating systems which supplies licenced 'technology' out of the box.

They are not carrying that cost for you if that is what you imagined, they offload it onto the customer through the asking price. "

No, I meant that end-users do not have to worry about paying royalties or such as lemur2 tried to imply. Since the cost of them is already baked-in the end-users just buy the product and that's that. [/q]

Since software is mathematics (a fact which commercial software vendors don't want widely known), software patents are effectively effectively charges for mathematics. Why should end users of software have to pay for mathematics? No-one else does, since mathematics is not patentable subject matter.

In software, there is always more than one method to perform a function. The function of the kernel, for example, is an extremely similar function for the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel, but implemented in an entirely different way. A lot of software patents seek to collect royalties for any implementation ... which is also wrong since a patent is meant to cover only one specific method of achieving some goal.

Finally, Unix and VMS are decades-old operating systems for which Linux and Windows respectively are new implementations. Why should anyone have to pay royalties for a modern re-implementation of decades-old ideas? Patents are only supposed to last for 20 years.